This is not 1968

People have been comparing every year to 1968 since about 1948

I keep oscillating, but at one point last year I decided that 1968 is actually, well 1968 

But my takes keep flipping, and as of now in this lower Manhattan early afternoon, I firmly believe that this is 1956

Let's start with the bleeding obvious: SUEZ

Just 4 famous letters

So, it turns out that all empires eventually overreach

Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser didn't just block the Suez Canal, he owned (nationalized) it!

Don't tell the Mullahs that little detail

Speaking of energy challenges, 1956 gave us the world's first industrial-scale commercial nuclear power plant - Calder Hall in the UK

Another reason why it's not 1968?

The band Interpol is back to being a hot new thing (and on June 13th 1956 the International Criminal Police Organization adopted Interpol as its official name)

And of course, the movie biopic of Michael Jackson's life looks like matching Rogers and Hammerstein's 'The King and I' for being the most financially successful of the year

Why again is 2026 like 1956?

What - my friends - is the biggest ongoing oh-dear-it's-not-going-away thing about 2026?

AI.

And guess when that all that kicked off?

July 13th, 1956: John McCarthy (Dartmouth), Marvin Minsky (MIT), Claude Shannon (Bell Labs) and Nathaniel Rochester (IBM) assembled the first coordinated research meeting on the topic of artificial intelligence

The result?

AI. 

It's not 1968, it’s 1956